Today I'm finishing EU17 (Ecclesiastes 7), page 272. I've still got 144 pages to go. Editing Draft One has been a fun but massive project since it was atrocious. Here are the challenges of creating Draft Two:
- Characters: I wrote the words first and am now figuring out who said them. This task is sheer bliss but it's time consuming. God invented people in seven days. It takes me a little longer.
- Character depth and consistency: My hope is to create characters readers care about. I gotta keep them "in character" and hopefully multidimensional (as if comic book characters can have depth).
- Staging: who is on stage (in the panel), what's the fewest number of characters necessary to complete a thought unit, how often do I reveal a new character, and have characters storm out of classroom?
- Text: the rough dialog in Draft One had potential. In Draft Two I'm sharpening the philosophy, theology, psychology, and humor sometimes eliminating the dialog entirely and rewriting from scratch.
- Word balloons. I'm putting Publisher's Basic Shapes boxes around each text box. Six boxes per page times 272 pages (so far) is 1632 boxes too many! Again, highly time consuming. But this will save me having to hand draw them. Uniform and crisp text boxes will add a touch of gravitas and hopefully will subtlety accentuate the words; hand drawn boxes will be distracting.
- Cutting and pasting. Rifling though my file of 20 characters, cutting out each face, scotch taping them to Draft Two is all very time consuming.
- Emailing. I do all this work on my lap top which is not hooked up to a printer. I therefore email finished files to my desk top (in the next room) and print hard copies there.
- Mulling. These first seven challenges are peppered with my ongoing inner dialog, "What's the time line of this thing? Do the characters change clothes? How do I get drop outs back into the classroom? How will Mr. Q respond when challenged by students? How will I divide the printed book? 416 Publisher pages will become 208 Paint pages. But there's no 208 page graphic novel. Do I print this as a four part trilogy? A ten part mini comic? Do I print hard copies at all or is it pure digital? Who will I get to proof read this? Do line editing? Evaluate the plot, humor, coherence, etc?"
Despite all these challenges...I'm still shooting for the May 15 deadline to complete Draft Two.
I suspect I'm going to print a hard copy Draft Three on which I'll draw penciled layouts. (I'm anticipating the joy of designing pages, getting creative with panel shapes, and drawing detailed spreads of the whole class room). I dare not ink/color Draft Three however. That will be Draft Four. I'll give Draft Three to some folks for their feedback. Sigh....that puts me months behind schedule. Oh well.
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